
Class JR'D 3 . 



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3 



(L©'p^' 



/ 



"OH, WELL, YOU KNOW HOW WOMEN AREl" 

BY IRVIN S. COBB 






"OH, WELL. YOU KNOW 
HOW WOMEN ARE!" 



BY 

IRVIN S. COBB 

AUTHOR OF "the LIFE OF THE PARTY, 
"back HOME," "old JUDGE PRIEST," 
ETC. 







NEW ^^tair YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 

3 







COPYRIGHT, 1920, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



COPYRIGHT, I9I9, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHWG COMPANY 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



t 



"OH, WELL, YOU KNOW 
HOW WOMEN AREl" 

SHE emerges from the shop. She is any 
woman, and the shop from which she emerges 
is any shop in any town. She has been shopping. 
This does not imply that she has been buying any- 
thing or that she has contemplated buying any- 
thing, but merely that she has been shopping — a 
very different pursuit from buying. Buying im- 
plies business for the shop; shopping merely im- 
plies business for the clerks. 

As stated, she emerges. In the doorway she 
runs into a woman of her acquaintance. If she 
likes the other woman she is cordial. But if she 
does not like her she is very, very cordial. A 
woman's aversion for another woman moving in 
the same social stratum in which she herself moves 
may readily be appraised. Invariably it is in 
inverse ratio to the apparent affection she displays 
upon encountering the object of her disfavor. 
Why should this be'? I cannot answer. It is 
not given for us to know. 

[7] 



"Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!'' 

Very well, then, she meets the other woman at 
the door. They stop for conversation. Two men 
meeting under the same condition would me- 
chanically draw away a few paces, out of the 
route of persons passing in or out of the shop. 
No particular play of the mental processes would 
actuate them in so doing; an instinctive impulse, 
operating mechanically and subconsciously, would 
impel them to remove themselves from the main 
path of foot travel. But this woman and her 
acquaintance take root right there. Persons dodge 
round them and glare at them. Other persons 
bump into them, and are glared at by the two 
traffic blockers. Where they stand they make a 
knot of confusion. 

But does it occur to either of them to suggest 
that they might step aside, five feet or ten, and 
save themselves, and the pedestrian classes gen- 
erally, a deal of delay and considerable annoy- 
ance? It does not. It never will. If the m.eet- 
ing took place in a narrow passageway or on a 
populous staircase or at the edge of the orbit of 
a set of swinging doors or on a fire escape landing 
upon the front of a burning building, while one 
was going up to aid in the rescue and the other 
was coming down to be saved — if it took place 
just outside the Pearly Gates on the Last Day 

[8] 



''Oh, Well, You Know How Women Arer 

when the quick and the dead, called up foi judg- 
ment, were streaming in through the portals — 
still would they behave thus. Where they met 
would be where they stopped to talk, regardless 
of the consequences to themselves, regardless of 
impediment to the movements of their fellow 
beings. 

Having had her say with her dear friend or 
her dear enemy, as the case may be, our heroine 
proceeds to the corner and hails a passing street 
car. Because her heels are so high and her skirts 
are so snug, she takes about twice the time to 
climb aboard that a biped in trousers would take. 
Into the car she comes, teetering and swaying. 
The car is no more than comfortably filled. True, 
all the seats at the back where she has entered 
are occupied; but up at the front there still is 
room for another sittee or two. Does she look 
about her to ascertain whether there is any space 
left*? I need not pause for reply. I know it al- 
ready, and so do you. Midway of the aisle-length 
she stops and reaches for a strap. She makes an 
appealing picture, compounded of blindness, 
helplessness, and discomfort. She has clinging 
vine written all over her. She craves to cling, 
but there is no trellis. So she swings from her 
strap. 

[9] 



^'Oh, Well, You Kruym How Women Arer 

The passengers nearest her are all men. She 
stares at them, accusingly. One of them bends 
forward to touch her and tell her that there is 
room for her up forward; but now there aren't 
any seats left. Male passengers, swinging aboard 
behind her, have already scrouged on by her and 
taken the vacant places. 

In the mind of one of the men in her imme- 
diate vicinity chivalry triumphs over impatience. 
He gives a shrug of petulance, arises and begs 
her to have his seat. She is not entitled to it cm 
any ground, save compassion upon his part. By 
refusing to use the eyes in her head she has for- 
feited all right to special consideration. But he 
surrenders his place to her and she takes it. 

The car bumps along. The conductor, mak- 
ing his rounds, reaches her. She knows he is com- 
ing; at least she should know it. A visit from the 
conductor has been a feature of every one of the 
thousands of street-car rides that she has taken 
in her life. She might have been getting her fare 
ready for him. There are a dozen handy spots 
where she might have had a receptacle built for 
carrying small change — in a pocket in her skirt, 
in a fob at her belt, in her sleeve or under her cuff. 
Counting fob pockets and change pockets, a man 
has from nine to fifteen pockets in his everyday 

[10] 



''Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!" 

garments. If also he is wearing an overcoat, add 
at least three more pockets to the total. It would 
seem tlrat she might have had at least one de- 
pendable pocket. But she has none. 

The conductor stops, facing her, and mean- 
while wearing on his face that air of pained resig- 
nation which is common to the faces of conductors 
on transportation lines that are heavily patronized 
by women travelers. In mute demand he extends 
toward her a soiled palm. With hands encased 
in overtight gloves she fumbles at the catch of a 
hand bag. Having wrested the hand bag open, 
she paws about among its myriad and mysterious 
contents. A card of buttons, a sheaf of samples, 
a handkerchief, a powder puff for inducing low 
visibility of the human nose, a small parcel of 
something, a nail file, and other minor articles 
are disclosed before she disinters her purse from 
the bottom of her hand bag. Another struggle 
with the clasp of the purse ensues; finally, one 
by one, five coppers are fished up out of the 
depths and presented to the conductor. The 
lady has made a difficult, complicated rite of 
what might have been a simple and a swift 
formality. 

The car proceeds upon its course. She sits in 
her seat, wearing that look of comfortable self- 

[n] 



"Oh, Well, You Know How Women AreT 

absorption which a woman invariably wears when 
she is among strangers, and when she feels herself 
to be well dressed and making a satisfactory pub- 
lic appearance. She comes out of her trance with 
a start on discovering that the car has passed her 
comer or is about to pass it. All flurried, she 
arises and signals the conductor that she is alight- 
ing here. From her air and her expression, we 
may gather that, mentally, she holds him respon- 
sible for the fact that she has been carried on be- 
yond her proper destination. 

The car having stopped, she makes her way to 
the rear platform and gets off — gets off the wrong 
way. That is to say, she gets off with face toward 
the rear. Thus is achieved a twofold result: 
She blocks the way of anyone who may be de- 
sirous of getting aboard the car as she gets off 
of it, and if the car should start up suddenly, be- 
fore her feet have touched the earth, or before 
her grip on the hand rail has been relaxed, she 
will be flung violently down upon the back of 
her head. 

From the time he is a small boy until he is in 
his dotage, a man swings off a car, facing in the 
direction in which the car is headed. Then, a 
premature turn of a wheel pitches him forward 
with a good chance to alight upon his feet, 

[12] 



/ 



^'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!" 

whereas the same thing happening when he was 
facing in the opposite direction would cause him 
to tumble over backward, with excellent pros- 
pects of cracking his skull. But in obedience to 
an immutable but inexplicable vagary of sex, a 
woman follows the patently wrong, the obviously 
dangerous, the plainly awkward system. 

As the conductor rings the starting bell, he 
glances toward a man who is riding on the rear 
platform. 

"Kin ycu beat 'um?" says the conductor. "I 
ast you — kin you beat 'um*?" 

The man to whom he has put the question is 
a married man. Being in this state of marriage 
he appreciates that the longer you live with them 
the less able are you to fathom the workings of 
their minds with regard to many of the simpler 
things of life. Speaking, therefore, from the 
heights of his superior imderstanding, he says in 
reply : 

*'0h, well, you know how women are!'* 

We know how women are. But nobody knows 
why they are as they are. 

Please let me make myself clear on one point: 
As an institution, and as individuals, I am for 
wcHTicn. They constitute, and deservedly too, the 
most popular sex we have. Since away back 

[13] 



"Oh, Well, You Know How TV omen Are!** 

yonder I have been in favor of granting them 
suffrage. For years I have felt it as a profound 
conviction that the franchise should be expanded 
at one end and abridged at the other — made 
larger to admit some of the women, made smaller 
to bar out some of the men. I couldn't think of 
very many reasons why the average woman should 
want to mix in politics, but if she did wish so to 
m.ix and mingle, I couldn't think of a single valid 
reason why she should not have full permission, 
not as a privilege, not as a boon, but as a com- 
mon right. Nor could I bring myself to share, 
in any degree, the apprehension of some of the 
anti-suffragists who held that giving women votes 
would take many of them entirely out of the state 
of motherhood. I cannot believe that all the 
children of the future are going to be bom on 
the first Tuesday after the first Monday in No- 
vember. Surely some of them will be bom on 
other dates. Indeed the only valid argument 
against woman suffrage that I could think of was 
the conduct of some of the women who have been 
for it. 

To myself I often said : 

"Certainly I favor giving them the vote. See- 
ing what a mess the members of my own sex so 
often make of the job of trying to run the coun- 

[14] 



*'01i. Well, You Know Horn Women Are!" 

try, I don't anticipate that the Republic will go 
upon the shoals immediately after women begin 
voting and campaigning and running for office. 
At the helm of the ship of state we've put some 
pretty sad steersman from time to time. Better 
the hand that rocks the cradle than the hand that 
rocks the boat. We men have let slip nearly all 
of the personal liberties for which our fathers 
fought and bled — that is to say, fought the Brit- 
ishers and bled the Injuns. Ever since the Civil 
War we have been so dummed busy telling the 
rest of the world how free we were that we failed 
to safeguard that freedom of which we boasted. 
*'We commiserate the Englishman because he 
chooses to live under an hereditary president 
called a king, while we are amply content to go 
on living under an elected king called a presi- 
dent. We cannot understand why he, a free 
citizen of the free-est country on earth, insists on 
calling himself a subject; but we are reconciled 
to the fiction of proclaiming ourselves citizens, 
while each day, more and more, we are becoming 
subjects — the subjects of sumptuary legislation, 
the subjects of statutes framed by bigoted or 
frightened lawgivers, the subjects of arbitrary 
mandates and of arbitrary decrees, the subjects, 
the abject, cringing subjects, of the servant classes, 

[15] 



"Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!" 

the police classes, the labor classes, the capitalistic 
classes." 

Naturally, as a Democrat I have felt these 
things with enhanced bitterness when the Republi- 
cans were in office; nevertheless, I have felt 
them at other times, too. And, continuing along 
this line of thought, I have repeatedly said to my- 
self: 

"In view of these conditions, let us give 'em 
the vote — eventually, but not just yet. While 
still we have control of the machinery of the 
ballot let us put them on probation, as it were. 
They claim to be rational creatures; very well, 
then, make 'em prove it. Let us give 'em the 
vote just as soon as they have learned the right 
way in which to get off of a street car." 

In this, though, I have changed my mind. I 
realize now that the demand was impossible, that 
it was — oh, well, you know what women are I 

We have given woman social superiority; 
rather she has acquired it through having earned 
it. Shortly she will have been put on a basis of 
political equality with men in all the states of the 
Union. Now she thinks she wants economic 
equality. But she doesn't; she only thinks she 
does. If she should get it she would refuse to 
abide by its natural limitations on the one side 

[16] 



''Oh, Well, You Know Horn Women AreT 

and its natural expansions for her sphere of 
economic development on the other. For, tem- 
peramentally, God so fashioned her that never 
can she altogether quit being the clinging vine 
and become the sturdy oak. She'll insist on hav- 
ing all the prerogatives of the oak, but at the 
same time she will strive to retain the special con- 
siderations accorded to the vine which clings. If 
I know anything about her dear, wonderful, in- 
comprehensible self, she belongs to the sex which 
would eat its cake and have it, too. Some men 
are constructed after this design. But nearly all 
women are. 

Give her equal opportunities with men in busi- 
ness — put her on the same footing and pay to her 
the same salary that a man holding a similar job 
is paid. So far so good. But then, as her em- 
ployer, undertake to hand out to her exactly the 
same treatment which the man holding a like 
position expects and accepts. There's where Mr. 
Boss strikes a snag. The salary she will take — 
oh, yes — but she arrogates to herself the sweet 
boon of weeping when things distress her, and, 
when things harass her, of going off into tantrums 
of temper which no man in authority, however 
patient, would tolerate on the part of another 
man serving under him. 

[17] 



^'Oh, Well, You Know How Women AreT 

Grant to her equal powers, equal responsibili- 
ties, equal favors and a pay envelope on Saturday 
night containing as much money as her male co- 
worker receives. That is all very well; but seek, 
however gently, however tactfully, however 
diplomatically, to suggest to her that a simpler, 
more businesslike garb than the garb she favors 
would be the sane and the sensible thing for busi- 
ness wear in business hours. And then just see 
what happens. 

A working woman who, through the working 
day, dresses in plain, neat frocks with no jangling 
bracelets upon her arms, no foolish furbelows at 
her wrists, no vain adornments about her throat, 
no exaggerated coiffure, is a delight to the eye 
and, better still, she fits the setting of her environ- 
m.ent. Tw^o of the most competent and depend- 
able human beings I know are both of them 
women. One is the assistant editor of a weekly 
magazine. The other is the head of an important 
departm_ent in an important industry. In the eve- 
ning you would never find a woman better 
groomed or, if the occasion demand, more ornately 
rigged-out than either one of these young women 
will be. But always, while on duty, they 
wear a correct and proper costume for the work 
thev are doing, and they match the picture. These 

[18] 



"Oh, Well, You Know How Women ^Arel" 

two, though, are, I think, exceptions to the rule 
of their sex. 

Trained nurses wear the most becoming uni- 
forms, and the most suitable, considering their 
calling, that were ever devised. To the best of 
my knowledge and belief there is no /ecord where 
a marriageable male patient on the road to re- 
covery and in that impressionable mood which ac- 
companies the convalescence of an ordinarily 
healthy man, failed to fall in love with his 
nurse. A competent, professional nurse who has 
the added advantage on her side of being comely 
— and it is powerfully hard for her to avoid being 
comely in her spotless blue and starchy white — 
stands more chances of getting the right sort of 
man for a husband than any billionaire's daughter 
alive. 

But I sometimes wonder what weird sartorial 
eccentricities some of them would indulge in did 
not convention and the standing laws of their pro- 
fession require of them that they all dress after 
a given pattern. And if the owners and managers 
of big city shops once lifted the rule prescribing 
certain modes for their female working staffs — 
if they should give their women clerks a free hand 
in choosing their own wardrobes for store hours — - 
well, you know how women are! 

[19] 



^'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!'' 

Nevertheless and to the contrary notwithstand- 
ing, I will admit while I am on this phase of my 
topic that there likewise is something to be said 
in dispraise of my own sex too. In the other — 
and better half of this literary double sketch- 
team act, rriy admired and talented friend, Mrs. 
Mary Roberib Rinehart, cites chapter and verse to 
prove the unaccountable vagaries of some men in 
the matter of dress. There she made but one mis- 
take — a mistake of under-estimation. She men^ 
tloned specifically some men; she should have in* 
eluded all men. 

The only imaginable reason why any rational 
he-biped of adult age clings to the habiliments 
ordained for him by the custom and the tailors of 
tills generation, is because he is used to them. A 
man can stand anything once he gets used to it 
because getting used to a thing commonly means 
that the habitee has quit worrjdng about it. And 
yet since the dawn of time when Adam poked fun 
at Eve's way of wearing her fig-leaf and on down 
through the centuries until the present day and 
date it has ever been the custom of men to gibe at 
the ganr.ents worn by women. Take our humor- 
ous publications, which I scarcely need point out 
are edited by men. Hardly could our comic 
weeklies manage to come out if the jokes about 

[20] 



''Olh Well, You Know How Women Are!"" 



the things which women wear were denied to them 
as fountain-sources of inspiration. To the vaude- 
ville monologist his jokes about his wife and his 
mother-in-law and to the comic sketch artist his 
pictures setting forth the torments of the stock 
husband trying to button the stock gown of a stock 
wife up her stock back — these are dependable and 
inevitable stand-bys. 

Women do wear maniacal garments sometimes ; 
that there is no denying. But on the other hand 
styles for women change with such frequency 
that no quirk of fashion however foolish and dis- 
figuring ever endures for long enough to work 
any permanent injury in the health of its tem- 
porarily deluded devotees. Nothing I can think 
of gets old-fashioned with such rapidity as a 
feminine fashion unless it is an egg. 

If this season a woman's skirt is so scantily 
fashioned that as she hobbles along she has the 
appearance of being leg-shackled, like the lady 
called Salammbo, it is as sure as shooting that, 
come next season, she will have leapt to the other 
extreme and her draperies will be more than 
amply voluminous. If this winter her sleeves are 
like unto sausage casings for tightness, be pre- 
pared when spring arrives to see her wearing prac- 
tically all the sleeves there are. About once in 

[21] 



''Oh, Well, You Know Horn Women Are!" 

so often she is found wearing a mode which com- 
bines beauty with saneness but that often is not 
very often. 

But even when they are at apogee of sartorial 
ridiculousness I maintain that the garments of 
women, from the comfort standpoint, anyhow, 
are not any more foolish than the garments to 
which the average man is incurably addicted. If 
women are vassals to fashion men are slaves to 
convention, and fashion has the merit that it alters 
overnight, whereas convention is a slow moving 
thing that stands still a long time before it 
does move. G)nvention is the wooden Indian 
of civilization; but fashion is a merry-go- 
round. 

In the Temperate zone in summertim.e, Every- 
woman looks to be cooler than Everyman — and 
by the same token is cooler. In the winter she 
wears lighter garments than he would dream of 
wearing, and yet stays warmer than he does, can 
stand more exposure without outward evidence of 
suffering than he can stand, and is less succeptible 
than he to colds and grips and pneumonias. Com- 
pare the thinness of her heaviest outdoor wrap 
with the thickness of his lightest ulster, or the heft 
of her so-called winter suit with the weight of 
the outer garments which he wears to business. 

[22] 



^'OU, Well, Ymi Kivyw Horn Women Are!'' 

and if you are yourself a man you will wonder 
why she doesn't freeze stiff when the thermometer 
falls to the twenty-above mark. Observe her in 
a ballroom that is overheated in the corners and 
draughty near the windows, as all ballrooms are. 
Her neck and her throat, her bosom and arais are 
bare. Her frock is of the filmiest gossamer stuff; 
her slippers are paper thin, her stockings the 
sheerest of textures, yet she doesn't sniff and her 
nose doesn't turn red and the skin upon her ex- 
posed shoulders refuses to goose-flesh. She is the 
marvel of the ages. She is neither too warm nor 
too cold; she is just right. Consider now her 
male companion in his gala attire. One minute 
he is wringing wet with perspiration; that is 
when he is dancing. The next minute he is visibly 
congealing. That is because he has stopped to 
catch his breath. 

Why this difference between the sexes ^ The 
man is supposed to be the hardier creature of the 
two, but he can't prove it. Of course there may 
be something in the theory that when a woman 
feels herself to be smartly dressed, an exaltation 
of soul lifts her far above realization of bodily 
discomfort. But I make so bold as to declare that 
the real reason why she is comfortable and he is 
not, lies in the fact that despite all eccentricities of 

[23] 



''Oh, Well, You Know How Women ^Arer 

costume in which she sometimes indulges, Every- 
woman goes about more rationally clad than 
Ever}Tnan does. 

For the sake of comparing two horrible ex- 
amples, let us take a woman esteemed to be over- 
dressed at all points and angles where she is not 
under-dressed, and, mentally, let us place along- 
side her a man who by the standards of his times 
and his contemporaries is conventionally garbed. 
To find the woman we want, we probably must 
travel to New York and seek her out in a smart 
restaurant at night. Occasionally she is found 
elsewhere but it is only in New York, that city 
where so many of the young women are prema- 
turely old and so many of the old women are pre- 
maturely young, that she abounds in sufficient pro- 
fusion to become a common type instead of an 
infrequent one. This woman is waging that bat- 
tle against the mounting birthdays which nobody 
ever yet won. Her hair has been dyed in those rich 
autumnal tints which are so becoming to a tree 
in its Indian summer, but so unbecoming to a 
woman in hers. Richard K. Fox might have de- 
signed her jewelry; she glistens with diamonds 
until she makes you think of the ice coming out 
of the Hudson River in the early spring. But 
about her complexion there is no suggestion of a 

[24] 



''OK Well, You Know How Women Are!" 

March thaw. For it is a climate-proof shellac. 
Her eyebrows are the self-made kind, and her 
lips were done by hand. Her skirt is too short for 
looks and too tight for comfort; she is tightly 
prisoned at the waistline and not sufficiently con- 
fined in the bust. There is nothing natural or 
rational anywhere about her. She is as artificial 
as a tin minnow and she glitters like one. 

Next your attention is invited to the male of 
the species. He is assumed to be dressed in ac- 
cordance with the dictates of good taste and with 
due regard for all the ordinary proprieties. But 
is he'? Before deciding whether he is or isn't, 
let us look him over, starting from the feet and 
working upward. A matter of inches above his in- 
steps brings us to the bottom of his trouser-legs. 
Now these trouser-legs of his are morally certain 
to be too long, in which event they billow down 
over his feet in slovenly and ungraceful folds, or 
they are too short, in which event there is an 
awkward, ugly cross-line just above his ankles. 
If he is a thin man, his dress waistcoat bulges 
away from his breastbone so the passerby can 
easily discover what brand of suspenders he 
fancies; but if he be stoutish, the waistcoat has 
a little way of hitching along up his mid-riff inch 
by inch until finally it has accordion-pleated itself 

[25] 



''Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!" 

in overlapping folds thwartwise of his tummy, 
coyly exposing an inch or so of clandestine shirt- 
front. 

It requires great will-power on the part of 
the owner and constant watchfulness as well to 
keep a fat man's dress waistcoat from behaving 
like a railroad folder. His dinner coat or his 
tail coat, if he wears a tail coat, is invariably 
too tight in the sleeves; nine times out of ten it 
binds across the back between the shoulders, and 
bulges out in a pouch effect at the collar. His 
shirt front, if hard-boiled, is as cold and clammy 
as a morgue slab when first he puts it on; but as 
hot and sticky as a priming of fresh glue after 
he has worn it for half an hour in an overheated 
room — and all public rooms in America are over- 
heated. Should it be of the pleated or medium 
well-done variety, no power on earth can keep it 
from appearing rumply and untidy; that is, no 
power can if the wearer be a normal man. I am 
not speaking of professional he-beauties or models 
for the illustrations of haberdashers' advertise- 
ments in the magazines. His collar, which is a 
torturer's device of stiff linen and yielding starch, 
is not a comparatively modern product as some 
have imagined. It really dates back to the Span- 
ish Inquisition where it enjoyed a great vogue. 

[26] 



''Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!'* 

Faring abroad, he encloses his head, let us say in 
a derby hat. Some people think the homeliest 
thing ever devised by man is Grant's Tomb. 
Others favor the St. Louis Union Depot. But I 
am pledged to the derby hat. And the high or 
two-quart hat runs second. 

This being the case for and against the parties 
concerned, I submit to the reader's impartial judg- 
mxcnt the following question for a decision: Tak- 
ing everything into consideration, which of these 
two really deserves the booby prize for unbecom- 
ing apparel — the woman who plainly is dressed in 
bad form or the man who is supposed to be dressed 
in good form'? But this I will say for him as 
being in his favor. He has sense enough to wear 
plenty of pockets. And in his most infatuated 
moments he never wears nether garments so tight 
that he can't step in 'em. Can I say as much for 
woman*? I cannot. 

A few pages back I set up the claim that 
woman, considered as a sex and not as an excep- 
tional type, cannot divorce the social relation from 
the economic. I think of an illustration to prove 
my point: In business two men may be closely 
associated. They may be room-mates besides; 
chums, perhaps, at the same club; may borrow 
money from each other and wear each other's 

[27] 



"Oh, Well, You Know How Women AreT 

clothes; and yet, so far as any purely confidential 
relation touching on the private sides of their 
lives is concerned, may remain as far apart as the 
poles. 

It is hard to imagine two women, similarly 
placed, behaving after the same common-sense 
standards. Each insists upon making a confidante 
of her partner. Their intimacy becomes a thing 
complicated with extraneous issues, with jointly 
shared secrets, with disclosures as to personal likes 
and dislikes, which should have no part in it if 
there is to be continued harmony, free from heart- 
burnings or lacerated feelings, or fancied slights 
or blighted affections. Sooner or later, too, the 
personality of the stronger nature begins to over- 
shadow the personality of the weaker. Almost 
inevitably there is a falling-out. 

I do not share the somewhat common opinion 
that in their friendships women are less constant 
than men are. But the trouble with them is that 
they put a heavier burden upon friendship than 
so delicate, so sensitive a sentiment as real friend- 
ship is was ever meant to bear. Something has 
to give way under the strain. And something 
does. 

To be sure there is an underlying cause in 
extenuation for this temperamental shortcoming 

[28] 



''Oh, Well, Yo u Know How Women Are!'' 

which in justice to the ostensibly weaker sex 
should be set forth here. Even though I am tak- 
ing on the role of DeviPs Advocate in the struggle 
to keep woman from canonizing herself by mam 
force I want to be as fair as I can, always reserv- 
ing the privilege where things are about even, of 
giving my own side a shade the better of it. The 
main tap-root reason why women confide over- 
much and too much in other women is because 
leading more circumscribed lives than men com- 
monly lead they are driven back upon themselves 
and into themselves and their sisters for interests 
and for conversational material. 

Taking them by and large they have less with 
which to concern themselves than their husbands 
and their brothers, their fathers and their sons 
have. Therefore they concern themselves the 
more with what is available, which, at the same 
time, oftener than not, means some other woman's 
private affairs. 

A woman, becoming thoroughly imbued with 
an idea, becomes, ninety-nine times out of a hun- 
dred, a creature of one idea. Everything else on 
earth is subordinated to the thing — cabal, reform, 
propaganda, crusade, movement or what not — m 
which she is interested. Now the average man 
may be very sincerely and very enthusiastically 

[29] 



"Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!'' 

devoted to a cause; but it does not necessarily 
follow that it will obsess him through every wak- 
ing hour. But the ladies, God bless 'em — and curb 
'em — ^are not built that way. A woman wedded 
to a cause is divorced from all else. She resents 
the bare thought that in the press of matters and 
the clash of worlds, mankind should for one mo- 
ment turn aside from her pet cause to concern 
itself with newer issues and wider motives. From 
a devotee she soon is transformed into a habitee. 
From being an earnest advocate she advances — 
or retrogrades — to the status of a plain bore. To 
be a common nuisance is bad enough ; to be a com- 
mon scold is worse, and presently she turns sccld 
and goes about railing shrilly at a world that 
criminally persists in thinking of other topics than 
the one which lies closest to her heart and loosest 
on her tongue. 

Than a woman who is a scold there is but one 
more exasperating shape of a woman and that is 
the woman who, not content with being the most 
contradictory, the most paradoxical, the most 
adorable of the Almighty's creations — to wit, a 
womanly woman — tries, among men, to be a good 
fellow, so-called. 

But that which is ordinarily a fault may, on 
occasion of extraordinary stress, become the most 

[30] 



''Oh, Well, Yon Know How Women Are!'' 

transcendent and the most admirable of virtues. 
I think of this last war and of the share our women 
and the women of other lands have played in it. 
No one caviled nor complained at the one-ideaness 
of womankind while the world was in a welter of 
woe and slaughter. Of all that they had, worth 
having, our women gave and gave and gave and 
gave. They gave their sons and their brothers, 
their husbands and their fathers, to their country ; 
they gave of their time and of their energies and 
of their talent; they gave of their wonderful 
mercy and their wonderful patience, and their yet 
more wonderful courage; they gave of the work 
of their hands and the salt of their souls and the 
very blood of their hearts. For every suspected 
woman slacker there were ten known men slackers 
— yea, ten times ten and ten to carry. 

Each day, during that war, the story of Mary 
Magdalene redeemed was somewhere lived over 
again. Every great crisis in the war-torn lands 
produced its Joan of Arc, its Florence Nightin- 
gale, its Clara Barton. To the women fell the 
tasks which for the most part brought no public 
recognition, no published acknowledgments of 
gratitude. For them, instead of the palms of vic- 
tory and the sheaves of glory, there were the 
crosses of sacrifice, the thorny diadems of suffer- 

[31] 



''OJi, Well, You Know How Women Are!" 



ing. We cannot conceive of men, thus circum- 
stanced, going so far and doing so much. But 
the women — 

Oh, well, you know how women are ! 



i 



T32I 



«0H, WELL, YOU KNOW HOW WOMEN AR ET 

IRVIN S. COBB 



■^ 



y 



«ISNT THAT JUST LIKE A MAN!" 

BY MARY ROBERTS RINEHART 



y 



"ISN'T THAT 
JUST LIKE A MAN!" 



BY 



MARY ROBERTS RINEHART 

AUTHOR OF "d.\NGEROUS DAYS," '*THE AMAZING 
INTERLUDE," "k," ETC. 




NEW ^iS^YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



COPYRIGHT, 1920, 
^Y GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



I 



COPYRIGHT, I919, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



il 



** ISN'T THAT 
JUST LIKE A MAN!" 

1 UNDERSTAND that Mr. Irvin Cobb is go- 
ing to write a sister article to this, and nat- 
urally he will be as funny as only he can be. It is 
always allowable, too, to be humorous about 
women. They don't mind, because they are ac- 
customed to it. 

But I simply dare not risk my popularity by 
being funny about men. Why, bless their hearts 
(Irvin will probably say of his subject, *'bless 
their little hearts." Odd, isn't it, how men al- 
ways have big hearts and women little ones ^ But 
we are good packers. We put a lot in 'em) I 
could be terribly funny, if only women were go- 
ing to read this. They'd understand. They know 
all about men. They'd go up-stairs and put on a 
negligee and get six baby pillows and dab a little 
cold cream around their eyes and then lie down 
on the couch and read, and they would all think 
I must have known their men-folks somewhere. 

But the men would read it and cancel the order 
for my next book, and say I must be a spinster, 
living a sort of in-bred existence. Why, I know 
at least a hundred good stories about one man 
alone, and if I published them he would either 

[7] 



"Isn't That Just Like a Manr 

grow suspicious and wonder who the man is, or. 
get sulky and resent bitterly being laughed at! 
Which is exactly like a man. Just little things, 
too, like always insisting he was extremely calm 
at his wedding, when the entire church saw him 
step off a platform and drop seven feet into 
tropical foliage. 

You see, women quite frequently have less wit 
than men, but they don't take themselves quite so 
seriously; they view themselves with a certain 
somewhat ironical humor. Men love a joke — 
on the other fellow. But your really humorous 
woman loves a joke on herself. That^s because 
women are less conventional, of course. I can 
still remember the face of the horrified gentleman 
I met one day on the street after luncheon, who 
had unconsciously tucked the comer of his 
luncheon napkin into his watch pocket along with 
his watch, and his burning shame when I observed 
that his new fashion was probably convenient but 
certainly novel. 

And I contrast it with the woman, prominent 
in the theatrical world, who had been doing a 
little dusting — yes, they do, but it is never pub- 
lished — ^before coming to lunch with me. She 
walked into one of the largest of the New York 
hotels, hatted, veiled and sable-ed, and wearing 
tied around her waist a large blue-and-white 
checked gingham apron. 

[8] 



''Isn't That Just Like a Man!" 

Now I opine (I have stolen that word from 
Irvin) that under those circumstances, or some- 
thing approximating them, such as pajama trous- 
ers, or the neglect to conceal that portion of a shirt 
not intended for the public eye, almost any man of 
my acquaintance would have made a wild bolt for 
the nearest bar, hissing like a teakettle. Note : This 
was written when the word bar did not mean to 
forbid or to prohibit. Thegingham-apron lady mere- 
ly stood up smilingly, took it off and gave it to the 
waiter, who being a man returned it later wrapped 
to look as much like a club sandwich as possible. 

Oh, they're conventional, these men, right 
enough! Now and then one of them gathers a 
certain amount of courage and goes without a hat 
to save his hair, or wears sandals to keep his feet 
cool, and he is immediately dismissed as mad. I 
know one very young gentleman who nearly broke 
up a juvenile dance by borrowing his mother's 
pink silk stockings for socks and wearing her best 
pink ribbon as a tie. 

How many hours do you suppose were wasted 
by the new army practicing salutes in front of a 
mirror? A good many right arms to-day, back in 
"civies," have a stuttering fit whenever they ap- 
proach a uniform. And I know a number of con- 
ventional gentlemen who are suffering hours of 
torment because they can't remember, out of uni- 
form, to take off their hats to the women they 

[9] 



"Isn't That Just Like a Man!'' 

meet. War is certainly perdition, isn't it*? And 
numbers of times during the late unpleasantness 
I have seen new officers standing outside a gener- 
al's door, trying to remember the rule for ad- 
dressing a superior, and cap or no cap while not 
wearing side arms. 

You know how a woman would do it. She 
would give a tilt to her hat and a pull here and 
there, and then she would walk in and say: 

"I know it's perfectly horrible, but I simply 
can't remember the etiquette of this sort of thing. 
Please do tell me, General." 

And the general, who has only eleven hundred 
things to do before eating a bite of lunch on the 
top of his desk, will get up and gravely instruct 
her. Which is exactly like a man, of course. 

Men overdo etiquette sometimes, because of 
a conventional fear of slipping up somewhere. 
There was a nice Red Cross major in France who 
had had no instruction in military matters, and 
had no arrogance whatever. So he used to salute 
all the privates and the M. P.'s before they had a 
chance. He was usually asking the road to some- 
where or other, and they would stand staring after 
him thoughtfully until he was quite out of sight. 

And as a corollary to this conventionality, how 
wretched men are when they are placed in false 
positions! Nobody likes it, of course, but a 
woman can generally get out of it. Men think 

[lo] 



''Isn't Tlmt Just Like a Manr 

straighter than women, but not so fast. I dined 
-one night on shipboard with the captain of the 
transport on which I came back from France, and 
there was an army chaplain at the table. So, as 
chaplains frequently say grace before meat, I put 
a hand on the knee of a young male member of 
my family beside me and kept it there, ready for 
a squeeze to admonish silence. But the chaplain 
did not say grace, and the man on my right sud- 
denly turned out to be a perfectly strange gen- 
eral in a state of helpless uneasiness. I have a 
suspicion that not even the absolute impeccability 
of my subsequent conduct convinced him that I 
was not a designing wom^an. 

But, although we are discussing men, as all 
women know, there are really no men at all. 
There are grown-up boys, and middle-aged boys, 
and elderly boys, and even sometimes very old 
bo3^s. But the essential difference is simply ex- 
terior. Your man is always a boy. He grows 
tidier, and he gathers up a mass of heteroge- 
neous information, and in the strangest pos- 
sible fashion as the years go on, boards have 
to be put into the dining-room table, and 
the shoe bill becomes something terrible, and dur- 
ing some of his peregrinations he feels rather like 
a comet with a tail. The dentist's bills and where 
to go for the summer and do-you-think-the-nurse- 
is-as-careful-as-she-should-be-with-baby's-bottles 

[11] 



''Isnt That Just Like a Man!" 

make him put on a sort of surface maturity. But 
it never fools his womankind. Deep down he 
still believes in Santa Claus, and would like to 
get up at dawn on the Fourth of July and throw 
a firecracker through the cook's window. 

That is the reason women are natural monogam- 
ists. They know they have to be one-man women, 
because the one man is so always a boy, and has 
to have so much mothering and looking after. He 
has to be watched for fear his hair gets too long, 
and sent to the tailor's now and then for clothes. 
And if someone didn't turn his old pajamas into 
scrub rags and silver cloths, he would go on wear- 
ing their ragged skeletons long after the flesh had 
departed hence. (What comforting rags Irvin 
Cobb's pajamas must make!) 

And then of course now and then he must be 
separated forcibly from his old suits and shoes. 
The best method, as every woman knows, is to 
give them to someone who is going on a long, long 
journey, else he will follow and bring them back 
in triumph. This fondness for what is old is a 
strange thing in men. It does not apply to other 
things — save cheese and easy chairs and some 
kinds of game and drinkables. In the case of caps, 
boots, and trousers it is akin to mania. It some- 
times applies to dress waistcoats and evening ties, 
but has one of its greatest exacerbations (beat that 
word, Irvin) in the matter of dressing gowns. If 

[12] 



''Im"t That Just Like a Mem!" 

by any chance a cigarette has burned a hole in the 
dressing gown, it takes on the additional interest 
of survival, and is always hung, hole out, where 
company can see it. 

Full many a gentleman, returning from the 
wars, has found that his heart's treasures have 
gone to rummage sales, and — you know the story 
of the man who bought his dress suit back for 
thirty-five cents. 

I am personally acquainted with a man who 
owns a number of pairs of bedroom slippers, nice 
leather ones, velvet ones, felt ones. They sit in 
a long row in his closet, and sit and sit. And when 
that man prepares for his final cigarette at night 
— and to drop asleep and burn another hole in his 
dressing gown, or in the chintz chair cover, or 
the carpet, as Providence may will it — ^he wears 
on his feet a pair of red knitted bedroom slippers 
with cords that tie around the top and dangle and 
trip him up. Long years ago they stretched, and 
they have been stretching ever since, until now 
each one resembles an afghan. 

Will he give them up ? He will not. 

There is something feline about a man's love 
for old, familiar things. I know that it is a 
popular misconception to compare women with 
cats and men with dogs. But the analogy is 
clearly the other way. 

Just run over the cat's predominant character- 

[13] 



''Isiit That Jus t Lik e aManT 

istic and check them off : The cat is a night wan- 
derer. The cat loves familiar places, and the 
hearthside. (And, oddly enough, the cat's love of 
the hearthside doesn't interfere with his night 
wanderings I) The cat can hide under the suavest 
exterior in the world principles that would make 
a kitten blush if it had any place for a blush. The 
cat is greedy as to helpless things. And heavens, 
how the cat likes to be petted and generally ap- 
proved I It likes love, but not all the time. And 
it likes to choose the people it consorts with. It is 
a predatory creature, also, and likes to be neat and 
tidy, while it sticks to its old trousers with a love 
that passeth understanding — there, I've slipped 
up, but you know what I mean. 

Now women are like dogs, really. They love 
like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to 
fetch and carry, and come back wistfully after 
hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a 
basket. And after three years or so of marriage 
they learn to enjoy the bones of conversation and 
sometimes even to go to the mat with them. (Oh, 
Irvin, I know that's dreadful ! ) Really, the only 
resemblance between men and dogs is that they 
both rather run to feet in early life. 

This fondness for old clothes and old chairs and 
familiar places is something women find hard to 
understand. Yet it is simple enough. It is com- 
poundec^ of comfort and loyalty. 

[14] 



"Isn't That Just Like a Manr 

Men are curiously loyal. They are loyal to an- 
cient hats and disreputable old friends and to some 
women. But they are always loyal to each other. 

This, I maintain, is the sole reason for alluding 
to them as the stronger and superior sex. They are 
stronger. They are superior. They are as strong 
as a trades union, only more so. They stand to- 
gether against the rest of the world. Women do 
not. They have no impulse toward solidarity. They 
fight a sort of guerilla warfare, each sniping from 
behind her own tree. They are the greatest exam.- 
ple of the weakness of unorganized force in the 
world. 

But this male trades union is not due to af- 
fection. It is two-fold. It is a survival from the 
days when men united for defense. Women didn't 
unite. They didn't need to, and they couldn't 
have, anyhow. When the cave man went away 
to fight or to do the family marketing, he used to 
roll a large bowlder against the entrance to his 
stone mansion, and thus -discouraged afternoon 
callers of the feminine sex who would otherwise 
have dropped in for a cup of tea. Then he took 
away the rope ladder and cut off the telephone, 
and went away with a heart at peace to join the 
other males. 

They would do it now, if they could. 

But the real reason for their sex solidarity is 
their terrible alikeness. They understand each 

[15] 



'"Isn't That Just Like a Manr 

other. Knowing their own weaknesses, they know 
the other fellow's. So they stand by each other, 
sometimes out of sympathy, and occasionally out 
of fear. You see, it is not only a trades union, it 
is a mutual benefit society. Its only constitution 
is the male Golden Rule — "You stick by me and 
I'll stick by you." *'We men must stick together." 

I'll confess that with a good many women it is, 
"You stick me and I'll stick you." 

But that solidarity, primarily offensive and de- 
fensive, has also an element in it that women 
seldom understand, and almost always resent. Not 
very many years ago a play ran in New York 
without a woman in the cast or connected with the 
story. There is one running very successfully 
now in Paris. Both were written by men, natural* 
ly. Women cannot conceive of the drama of life 
without women in it. But men can. 

The plain truth is that normal women need 
men all the time, but that normal men need 
women only a part of the time. They like to have 
them to go back to, but they do not need them in 
sight, or even within telephone call. There are 
some hours of every day when you could repeat 
a man's wife's name to him through a megaphone, 
and he would have to come a long ways back, 
from golf or pool or the ticker or the stock news, 
to remember who she is. 

When a man gets up a golf foursome he wants 

[16] 



'"Isn't That Just Like a Manr 

four men. When a woman does it, she wants three. 

It is this ability to be happy without her that 
a woman never understands. Her lack of under- 
standing of it causes a good bit of unhappiness, 
too. Men are gregarious ; they like to be together. 
But women gauge them by their own needs, and 
form dark surmises about these harmless meetings, 
which are as innocuous and often as interesting 
as the purely companionable huddlings of sheep 
in pasture. 

Women play bridge together to fill in the time 
until the five-thirty is due. Men play bridge be- 
cause they like to beat the other fellow. 

Mind you, I am not saying there are not strong 
and fine affections among women. If it comes to 
that, there is often deeper devotion, perhaps, than 
among men. But I am saying that women do not 
care for women as a sex, as men care for men. 
Men will die to save other men. Women will 
sacrifice themselves ruthlessly for children, but not 
for other women. Queer, isn't it? 

Yet not so queer. Women want marriage and 
a home. They should. And there are more women 
than men. Even before the war there was, in 
Europe and America, an extra sixth woman for 
every five men, and the sixth woman brings com- 
petition. She bulls the market, and makes femi- 
nine sex solidarity impossible. And, of course, 
added to that is the woman who requires three or 

[17] 



''Isn't That Ju^ Like a Manr 

four men to make her happy, one to marry and 
support her, and one to take her to the theater 
and to luncheon at Delmonico's, and generally 
fetch and carry for her, and one to remember her 
as she was at nineteen and remain a bachelor and 
have a selfish, delightful life, while blaming her. 
This makes masculine stock still higher, and as 
there are always buyers on a rising market, com- 
petition among women — ^purely unconscious com- 
petition — flourishes. 

So men hang together, and women don't. And 
men are the stronger sex because they are fewer! 

Obviously the cure is the elimination of that 
sixth woman, preferably by euthanasia. (Look 
this up, Irvin. It's a good one.) That sixth 
woman ought to go. She has made men sought 
and not seekers. She ruins dinner parties and is 
the vampire of the moving pictures. And after 
living a respectable life for years she either goes 
on living a respectable life, and stays with her 
sister's children while the family goes on a motor 
tour, or takes to serving high-balls instead of after- 
noon tea, while wearing a teagown of some pas- 
sionate shade. 

It is just possible that suffrage will bring women 
together. It is just possible that male opposition 
has in it this subconscious fear, that their superior- 
ity is thus threatened. They don't really want 
equality, you know. They love to patronize us 

[18] 



''Isnt That Just Like a Man!'' 

a. bit, bless them; and to tell us to run along and 
not bother our little heads about things that don't 
concern us. And, of course, politics has been their 
own private maneuvering ground, and — I have 
made it clear, I think, that they don't always want 
us — here we are, about to drill on it ourselves, 
perhaps drilling a mite better than they do in some 
formations, and standing right on their own held 
and telling them the mistakes they've made, and 
not to take themselves too hard and that the whole 
game is a lot easier than they have always pre- 
tended it was. 

They don't like it, really, a lot of them. Their 
solidarity is threatened. Their superiority, and 
another sanctuary, as closed to women as a mon- 
aster}% or a club, is invaded. No place to go but 
home. 

Yet I have a sneaking sympathy for them. 
They were so terribly happy running things, and 
fighting wars, and coming back at night to throw 
their conversational bones around the table. It is 
rather awful to think of them coming home now 
and having some little woman say: 

''Certainly we are not going to the movies. 
Don't you know there is a ward caucus to-night?" 

There is a curious situation in the economic 
world, too. Business has been the man's field ever 
since Cain and Abel went into the stock and farm- 
ing combine, with one of them raising grain for 

[19] 



''Isn't That Just Like a Manr 



the other's cows, and taking beef in exchange. And 
the novelty is gone. But there's a truism here: 
Men play harder than they work; women work 
harder than they play. 

Women in business bring to it the freshness of 
novelty, and work at their maximum as a sex. 
Men, being always boys, work under their maxi- 
mum. (Loud screams here. But think it over! 
How about shaking dice at the club after lunch, 
and wandering back to the office at three P. M. to 
sign the mail? How about golf? I'll wager I 
work more hours a day than you, Irvin I ) 

The plain truth is that if more men put their 
whole hearts into business during business hours, 
there would be no question of competition. As I 
have said, they think straighter than women, al- 
though more slowly. They have more physical 
strength. They don't have sick headaches — unless 
they deserve them. But they are vaguely resent- 
ful when some little woman, who has washed the 
children and sent them off to school and straight- 
ened her house and set out a cold lunch, comes 
into the office at nine o'clock and works in circles 
all around them. 

But there is another angle to this "woman in 
the business world" idea that puzzles women. Not 
long ago a clever woman whose husband does not 
resent her working, since his home and children 
are well looked after, said to me: 

[20] 



''Isn't That Just Like a Man!" 

"Fve always been interested in what he had 
to say of his day at the office, but he doesn't seem 
to care at all about my day. He seems so awfully 
self-engrossed." 

The truth probably is that they are both self- 
engrossed, but women can dissemble and men can- 
not. It is another proof of their invincible boy- 
ishness, this total inability to pretend interest- 
Even the averagest man is no hypocrite. He tries 
it sometimes, and fails pitifully. The successful 
male dissembler is generally a crook. But the 
most honest woman in the world is ofen driven 
to pretense, although she may call it savoir faire. 
She pretends, because pretense is the oil that lubri- 
cates society. Have you ever seen a man when 
some neighbors who are unpopular drop in for an 
evening call ? After they are gone, his wife says : 

"I do wish you wouldn't bite the Andersons 
when they come in, Joe I" 

"Bite them ! I was civil, wasn't W 

"Well, you can call it that." 

He is ready to examine the window locks, but 
he turns and surv^eys her, and he is honestly 
puzzled. 

"What I can't make out," he says, "is how you 
can fall all over yourself to those people, when 
you know you detest them. Thank heavens, I'm 
no hypocrite." 

Then he locks the windows and stalks up-stairs, 

[21] 



""Isn't That Just Like a 3Ianr 



and the hypocrite of the family smiles a little to 
herself. Because she knows that without her there 
would be no society and no neighborhood calls, 
and that honesty can be a vice, and hypocrisy a 
virtue. 

I know a vestryman of a church who sometimes 
plays bridge on Saturday nights for money. What 
he loses doesn't matter, but what he wins his wife 
is supposed to put on the plate the next morning. 
One Saturday night he gave her a large bill, and 
the next morning she placed a neatly folded green- 
back on the collection plate as he held it out to 
her. He stood in the aisle and eyed the bill with 
suspicion. Then he deliberately unfolded it, and 
held out the plate to her again. 

"Come over, Mazie," he said. 

And Mazie came over with the balance. 

You know what a woman would have done. 
She would have marked the bill with her eve, and 
later on while waiting at the rear for the chair of- 
fertory to end, she would have investigated. Then 
on the way home she would have said : 

"I had a good notion to stand right there, Char- 
lie Smith, and show you up. I wish I had." But 
the point is that she wouldn't have. 

There is no moral whatever to this brief tale. 

But perhaps it is in love that men and women 
diifer most vitally. Now Nature, being extremely 
wise, gives the man in love the wisdom of the ser- 

[22] 



'"Isnt Thut Just Like a Manr 



pent and the wile of the dove (which is a most al- 
luring bird in its love-making). A man in love 
brings to it all his intelligence. And men like 
being in love. 

Being in love is not so happy for a woman. 
She becomes emotional and difficult, is either on 
the heights or in the depths. And the reason for 
this is simple; love is a complex to a woman. She 
has to contend with natural and acquired inhibi- 
tions. She both desires love and fears it. 

The primitive woman ran away from her lover, 
but like Lot's wife, she looked back. I am in- 
clined to think, however, that primitive woman 
looked back rather harder than she ran. Be that as 
it may, women to-day both desire love and fear it. 

If men fear it, they successfully hide their cow- 
ardice. 

It is in their methods of making love that men 
cease to be alike. Up to that point they are very 
similar; they all think that, having purchased an 
automobile, they must vindicate their judgment 
by insisting upon its virtues, and a great many of 
them will spend as much money fixing over last 
year's car as would almost buy a new one; they 
always think they drive carefully, but that the 
fellow in the other car is either a road hog or a 
lunatic who shouldn't have a license; they are 
mostly rather moody before breakfast, although 
there is an obnoxious type that sings in the cold 

[23] 



''Is'nft That Jn^t Like a JIanr 

shower; they are all rather given to the practice 
of bringing gifts to their wives when they have 
done something they shouldn't; and they all have 
a tendency to excuse their occasional delinquen- 
cies by the argument that they never made any- 
body unhappy, and their weaknesses by the fact 
that God made them men. 

But it is in love that they are at their best, from 
the point of view of the one woman most inter- 
ested. And it is in their love methods that they 
show the greatest variations from type. Certain 
things of course they all do, buy new neckties, 
write letters which they read years later with 
am.azement and consternation ; keep a photograph 
in a drawer of the desk at the office, where the 
stenographer finds it and says to the office bo)^: 
''Can you beat that^ And not even pretty !" carry 
boxes of candy around, hoping they look like ci- 
gars; and lie awake nights wondering what she 
can see in him, and wondering if she is awake too. 

They are very dear and very humble and sheep- 
ish and self-conscious when they are in love, curi- 
ous mixtures of detemiination and vacillation; 
about eighty per cent, however, being determina* 
tion. But they lose for once their sex solidarity, 
and play the game every man for himself. Rough- 
ly speaking (although who can speak roughly of 
them then? Or at any time?) they divide into 
three types of lovers. There are men who are 
all three, at different times of course. But these 

[24] 



''Isnt That Just Like a Manr 

three classes of lovers have one thing in common. 
They want to do their own hunting. It gives them 
a sense of power to think they have won out by 
sheer strength and will. 

The truth about this is that no man ever won 
a woman who was actuallv difficult to get, and 
found it worth the effort afterwards. What real 
man ever liked kissing a girl who didn't want 
to be kissed *? Love has got to be mutual. Your 
lover is frequently more interested in being loved 
than in loving. And the trump cards are always 
the woman's. These grown-up boys of ours are 
shy and self-depreciatory in love, and they run like 
deer when they think they are not wanted. So 
the woman has to play a double game, and gets 
blamed for guile when it is only wisdom. He^ 
instinct is to run, partly because she is afraid of 
love and partly because she has to appear to be 
pursued. But she has to limp a bit, and sit down 
and look back rather wistfully, and in the end of 
course she goes lame entirely and is overtaken. 

This is the same instinct which makes the 
pheasant hen feign a broken wing. 

There is a wonderful type of woman, however, 
who goes as straight to the man she loves as a 
homing pigeon to its loft. 

Taking, then, the three classes of men in the 
throes of the disease of love, we have the follow- 
ing symptoms, diagnosis and prognosis. 

First. The average lover. Temperature re- 

[25] 



''Isnt That Just Like a Manr 

mains normal, with slight rise in the evenings. 
Continues to attend to business. Feeling of un- 
easiness if called by endearing names over office 
'phone. Regular diet, but smokes rather too 
much. Anxiety strongly marked as to how his in- 
come will cover a house and garage in the coun- 
try, adding the cost of his commutation ticket, 
and shows tendency to look rather wistfully into 
toy shop-windows before Christmas. 
Diagnosis : Normal love. 
Prognosis : Probably permanent condition.* 
Second. The fearful lover. Temperature in- 
clined to be sub-normal at times. Physical type, 
a hulking brute of a man, liking small women, 
only he feels coarse and rather gross when with 
them. He is the physical type generally attrib- 
uted to the cave man, but this is an error. (See 
cave man, later.) His timidity is not physical 
but mental, and is referable by the Freud theory 
to his early youth, when he was taught that big, 
overgrown boys did not tease kittens, but put them 
in their pockets and carried them home. Has the 
kitten obsession still. Is six months getting up 
enough courage to squeeze a five-and-a-half hand, 
and then crushes it to death. Reads poetry, and 
is very early for all appointments. Appetite 
small. Does not sleep. In small communities 

*Will probably forget small attentions to his wife after 
marriage. 

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''Isnt That Just Like aManT 



shows occasional semi-paralysis on the curb after 
Sunday evening service, and lets a fellow half his 
size see her home. (See cave man, later.) Is al- 
ways in love, but not with the same woman. Is 
easily hurt, and walks it off on Sunday afternoons. 
Telephones with gentle persistence, and prefers 
the movies to the theater because they are dark. 
This type sometimes loses its gentleness after mar- 
riage, and always has an ideal woman in mind. 
Some one who walks like Pauline Frederick and 
smiles like Mary Pickford.^ 

Diagnosis: Normal love, with idealistic com- 
plications. 

Prognosis: Condition less permanent than m 
case A, as less essentially monogamous. Should 
be careful not to carry the search for the ideal to 

excess. 

Third. The cave man. Tem.perature normal- 
ly high, with dangerous rises. Physique rather 
under-sized, with prominent Adam's apple. Is 
attracted by large women, whom he dommates. 
Is assured, violent and jealous. Appetite fastidi- 
ous. Takes sleeping powders during course ot 
disease and uses telephone frequently to find out 
if the object of his affections is lunchmg with an- 
other man. Is extremely possessive as to women, 
and has had in early years a strong desire to take 

* Will always remember small attentions to his wife after 
«siarriage, especially when conscience troubles him. 

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"'Isn't That Just Like a Man!" 

the other fellow's girl away from him. Is pug- 
nacious and intelligent, but has moments of great 
tenderness and charm. Shows his worst side to 
the neighbors and breathes freely after nine o'clock 
P.M., when no one has come to call.* 

Diagnosis: Normal love, with jealousy. 

Prognosis : A large family of daughters. 

A great many women believe that they can 
change men by marrying them. This is a mis- 
take. Women make it because they themselves 
are pliable, but the male is firmly fixed at the age 
of six years, and remains fundamentally the same 
thereafter. The only way to make a husband 
over according to one's ideas then would be to 
adopt him at an early age, say four. But who 
really wants to change them? Where would be 
the interest in marriage? To tell the truth, we 
like their weaknesses. It gives women that en- 
tirely private conviction they have that John 
would make an utter mess of things if they were 
not around. 

Men know better how to live than women. The 
average man gets more out of life than the aver- 
age woman. He compounds his days, if he be a 
healthy, normal individual, of work and play, 
and his play generally takes the form of fresh 
air and exercise. He has, frequently, more real 
charity than his womankind, and by charity I 

* Receives constant attention from his family after mar- 
riage. 

[28] 



''Isiit That Just Like a Manr 

mean an understanding of human weakness and 
a tolerance of frailty. He may dislike his neigh- 
bors heartily, and snub them in prosperity, but in 
trouble'he is quick with practical assistance. And 
although often tactless, for tact and extreme hon- 
esty are incompatible, he is usually kind. There is 
often aseliish purpose behind his altruism, his broad 
charitable organizations. But to individual cases of 
distress he is generous, unselfish, and sacrificing. 

In politics he is individually honest, as a rule, 
but collectively corrupt. And this strange and dis- 
heartening fact is due to lethargy. He is political- 
ly indolent, so he allows the few to rule, and this 
few is too frequently in political life for what it 
can get and not what it can give. Sins of omission 
may be grave sins. 

Yet he is individually honest in politics, and in 
most things, and that, partly at least, is because, 
pretty much overlaid with worldliness, he has a 
deep religious conviction. But he has a terrible 
fear of letting anyone know he has it. Indeed, he 
is shamefaced about all his emotions. He would 
sooner wear two odd shoes than weep at a funeral. 

Really, this article could min on forever. 
There's that particularly manlike attitude of ac- 
cusing women of slavishly following the fashions ! 
Funny, isn't it, when you think about it? Do 
you think a man would wear a striped tie with a 
morning coat when his haberdasher says others are 
wearing plain gray*? Or a straw hat before the 

[29] 



'"Isn't That Just Like a Manr 



fifteenth of May? Have you ever watched the 
mental struggle between a dinner suit and evening 
clothes? Do you suppose that women, realizing 
that the costume they wore was the ugliest ever 
devised, would continue wearing it because every- 
one else did? And then look at men's trousers 
and derby hats ! 

It is men who are the slaves, double chained, 
of fashion. The only comfortable innovation in 
men's clothes made in a century was when some 
brave spirit originated the shirtwaist man. Women 
saw its comfort, adopted and retained the shirt- 
waist. But the leaders of male fashion dictated 
that comfort was bad form, and on went all the 
coats again. Irvin Cobb is undoubtedly going to 
say that it is just like a woman to wear no flannels 
in winter, and silk hose, and generally go about 
half clad. But men are as over-dressed in sum- 
mer as women are under-dressed in winter. 

But in spite of this slavish following of fashion, 
men are really more rational than women. They 
have the same mental processes. For that reason 
they understand each other. Like the village fool 
who found the lost horse by thinking where he 
would go if he were a horse, a man knows what 
another man will do by fancying himself in the 
same circumstances. And women are called de- 
signing because they have fathomed this funda- 
mental simplicity of the male! A woman's emo- 
tions and her sensations and hex thoughts are all 

[30] 



"Isn't That JuM Like a Manr 

complexes. She doesn't know herself what she 
is going to do, and is frequently more astounded 
than anyone else at what she does do. It's a lot 
harder being a woman than a man. 

So — women know men better than men know 
women, and are rather like the little boy's defini- 
tion of a friend : "A friend is a feller who knows 
all about you, and likes you anyhow." 

We do like them, dreadfully. Sometimes 
women have sighed and wondered what the house 
would be like without overcoats thrown about in 
the hall, and every closet full of beloved old 
ragged clothes and shoes, and cigar ashes over 
things, and wild cries for the ancient hat they 
gave the gardener last week to weed in. But quite 
recently the women of this country and a lot of 
other countries have found out what even tem- 
porary absence means. A house without a man 
in it is as nice and tidy and peaceful and at- 
tractive and cheerful as a grave in a cemetery. 
It is as pleasant as Mark Twain's celebrated com- 
bination of rheumatism and St. Vitus dance, and 
as empty as a penny-in-the-slot chocolate machine 
in a railway station. 

Not so very long ago there was a drawing in 
one of the magazines. It showed a row of faces, 
men with hooked noses, with cauliflower ears, with 
dish-faces, and flat faces, with smallpox scars, 
with hare lips. And underneath it said : "Never 
mind, every one of them is somebody's darling." 

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''Isn't That Just Like a Man!" 



Women don't really care how their men look. 
But they want to look up to them — which is a 
reason I haven't given before for their sex superior- 
ity. It is really forced on them I And they want 
them kind and even a bit patronizing. Also they 
want them well^ because a sick man can come the 
closest thing in the world to biting the hand that 
feeds him. And loyal, of course, and not too tidy 
— and to be hungry at meals. And not to be too 
bitter about going out in the evenings. 

And the one thing they do not want is to have 
their men know how well they understand them. 
It is one of their pet little-boy conceits, this being 
misunderstood. It has survived from the time 
of that early punishment when each and every one 
of them contemplated running off and going to 
sea. Most of them still contemplate that running 
off. They visualize great spaces, and freedom, 
and tropic isles, and — well, you know. "Where 
there ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can 
raise a thirst." (You know, Irvin I) 

Yes, they contemplate it every now and then, 
and then they go home, and put on a fresh collar 
for dinner, and examine the vegetable garden, and 
take the children out in the machine for a few 
minutes' fresh air, and have a pillow fight in the 
nursery, and — forget the other thing. 

Which is exactly like a man. 

[32] 



«Sta« 



ISNT THAT JUST LIKE A MAN!" 
MARY ROBERTS RINEHART 



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X 



